


When you come back to me (again)

by ferggirl



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Universe Alteration, they totally could have given me this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 13:44:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11807151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/pseuds/ferggirl
Summary: What if the writers had really used the framework to right some wrongs, to give us back at least one smile we'd thought was gone forever?aka: Madame Hydra's machine gets used for the best possible reason when Daisy goes in for round 2 of the Framework.





	When you come back to me (again)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TinyBat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinyBat/gifts).



> I couldn't believe the writers didn't use this beautifully constructed door they built for themselves. Since they didn't, you better believe I will. #triplives #Istillcryaboutit
> 
> For Amanda, cause I know she knows how I feel.

It was madness. Another reality where she could touch and talk to people she’d buried in the ground a year ago. 

Some she’d put there. Some she’d fought like hell to keep alive. 

All of them haunted Daisy. 

Finding Grant Ward in her bed, comfortable in some sort of long term relationship where he was betraying HYDRA and she was blithely committed to the axis of evil was a shock. Deciding to trust him twisted her up inside. She could see hints of the person she’d once thought she knew in this computer simulation - this digital what-if. 

But she couldn’t forget what had really happened, the choices he had made and the people he had hurt. 

She might be able to trust him, but she couldn’t ever love this Grant Ward avatar. He was, after all, not real. 

This repeated itself over and over, the shock, the re-evaluation, the almost academic interest in how friends, colleagues, and team members seemed a little - or a lot - wrong. 

Daisy got used to it, mostly. She and Jemma were here to destroy this world, so they couldn’t get attached to the algorithms. 

But it shook her twice. 

Meeting Hope MacKenzie broke her heart first. Mack’s love for his daughter shone out of every pore - he was happier, more open, more willing to admit that he was wrong with the smart, serious 10-year-old at his side. 

That was the first time she wondered what would happen if she brought an avatar through the backdoor. 

(Radcliffe explained, of course, that nothing would happen. They had no body to latch onto, no place for those electrical impulses to go. But still.)

When Jemma walked through the door of the alt-base and Daisy turned into that welcoming, easy smile and those sparkling brown eyes, she forgot for a moment. Forgot that he wouldn’t know her, that he wasn’t real, that everything around them was equations and simulations, and just ran into his arms. 

He hugged her back, and then asked her name. It was so Antoine Triplett she bit her lip to keep from tearing up. 

In this simulation, there was no Coulson, so SHIELD fell and “Skye” went with it. In this simulation, she and Trip had never been on the same team to flirt and smile and fight and save each other. Which meant in this simulation, he had never followed her into a temple and held her eyes with his own as his life ended and hers truly began. 

In this simulation he was still here. 

She pushed Radcliffe harder, then. He stayed firm - the backdoor could not help them with an avatar. 

Then May let slip “Project Looking Glass” and Jemma figured out what it was for and Trip located it. Daisy couldn’t quite let go of the idea. 

It helped that Trip knew everything. He wasn’t like Ward or Mace or Mack, he didn’t fight the idea. In true Trip fashion, he nodded, laughed, and said, “Sure that makes sense. What do we do about it?” and got on with fighting for the greater good. 

They even talked through what she’d known of his life -- and how he’d died -- over a contraband bottle of whisky that he’d found in The Patriot’s office when she dragged him in there to look for more body armor. He was thoughtful, interested, but not horrified. 

“Hell, I’ve known you for about four days and I’m pretty sure you’re worth it,” he said with a smile and a toast of his glass. “He was probably halfway in love with you already.”

She laughed, and when she was alone later, she cried. Because she thought maybe he had been. And maybe she had been, too. 

She mentioned the hypothetical to Jemma over their weapons as they cleaned and loaded them. 

“So I get the problem with Aida using this Looking Glass, but what about an avatar? They basically are human, right?”

Jemma gave her one of those narrow-eyed looks that meant she knew where this question was leading and she wasn’t sure it was a particularly safe place to go. Daisy waited her out. 

“I suppose - as long as they never met their double, or their double didn’t exist in the real world,” she said finally. “But they would have to be able to accept, to fully understand the transition. Most people simply cannot do that. It would fracture their consciousness.”

That didn’t sound like a good deal, so she put it to the side. She said goodbye, to Hope, to Ward, and to Trip. She got her team through the backdoor, and left Mack behind because he wanted her to. 

But then Yo-Yo went back in, and Daisy had to go in after her. She rebuilt the back door first - it was much easier with Fitz there to back her up. Jemma pulled her aside after they secured the submerged Russian base and that narrow-eyed look was back on her face. But there was also the spark of hope. 

“You know what you said before,” she whispered. “We shouldn’t. Definitely a terrible idea.”

“Right, you’ve already said this.” Daisy was edgy. With May all but incapacitated, Mack out of service, and Fitz falling apart, now did not feel like a great time to visit a dying simulation. “Why repeat it?”

“Well the attempt to give Aida powers thankfully did not work - what a disaster that would have been,” Jemma muttered, staring across the room at Fitz, who was pacing and double-checking his calculations. “But Fitz said something that got me thinking.”

“About Aida?”

“Well - about, uh, about the two of them.” Jemma’s swallow looked painful, and her stiff upper lip trembled ever so slightly. “He asked her to bring him - across, to this world. She had planned to recreate him here, to never really wake him up.”

Daisy gaped. “To have two of him?” 

“Not really, of course. The real Fitz would have wasted away, trapped in an endless coma of nothingness but locked into the framework. But the point - they had theorized that having someone’s DNA, they could recreate the person perfectly and implant the framework mind. That it would be less of a jolt than creating one from scratch, like with Aida.”

It took a few seconds for Daisy to grasp it. “Oh my god. So we could do it? It’s not tied to who’s plugged in?”

Jemma bit her lower lip, but nodded. “I still say that psychologically, it’s riddled with potential problems. But yes. We could.”

“So Mack - Hope could come through?” She held her breath, afraid to hope it was that easy. That they could raise the dead as if they’d always been. 

“I don’t - I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Jemma started pacing, unconsciously mirroring Fitz from across the room. “She’s just a child, even in the framework, and while often that means the recuperative abilities are more elastic, in this case…”

“Just say it, Jemma. English would be good.” 

“Asking a 10-year-old to face a life being reborn after her family has buried her… there’s no way her psyche could survive that. It’s been years, from what I can tell, and her DNA is likely degraded even in a best case scenario. Not to mention her ties to the rest of the framework are very basic - from a coding perspective the only person who gave any information on her was Mac.” She gestured in the direction of the pacing Scot. “Fitz and I, we both agreed it was highly unlikely to work.”

“Then why are you telling me this?”

Suddenly, Fitz was there. Not meeting their eyes, fidgety and ashamed, but there. “SHIELD keeps perfectly preserved DNA samples of all agents. For health and identification purposes.”

Daisy looked between the two of them, Jemma guilty and unsure, Fitz pale and haunted. “What, do you want weird good-guy Ward back or… oh my god. Trip.”

“You said,” Jemma grimaced and looked at Fitz, who was still looking at the floor. “You said he was calm - accepting, even, when you explained. That’s a really good sign.”

“Yeah but don’t die trying to do it,” Fitz snapped out. “No one else dies.” 

“What he means is - well, he means don’t die trying to bring Trip back. We’d all be furious.” Jemma attempted a smile. It didn’t quite work. “Especially Agent Triplett, when you consider… well, everything.”

“How will I explain to Mack - to anyone else - does Coulson know?” Daisy’s head was spinning, almost as fast as her heart was racing. “Is this for real?”

Jemma handed her a small sheaf of papers. “Stamped and everything. Mission orders. He’d have delivered them himself but…” 

“But there are mutliple robot Russians still roaming the base and he’s a little busy. Yeah.” She flipped through them. It was right there, objective 3. Right under “return yourself and Agent Rodriguez safely” and “if possible extricate Agent Mackenzie.” 

“If time and opportunity present and he gives full and informed consent, propose extricating copy of Agent Triplett.”

She couldn’t stop her grin. “I guess I better get started. I gotta bring our people home. All of them.”

Jemma squeezed her hand. Fitz managed to look her in the eye long enough to say, “Be careful.”

“He’s given you detailed instructions, they’ll be in your phone when you wake up,” Jemma said as they both watched him pace back to the door. “I think - I think he is hoping he can redeem himself.”

Daisy could still feel the coldness of his disdain from her time in the HYDRA cell. “He doesn’t have to prove something to me.”

“No, just to himself.”

***

She woke up this time prepared. Without Aida, the world was unraveling – just as Fitz had warned. She was in the base, which was helpful. Ward was there, which was not.

“Skye, what we have to do is clear, stop fighting me on this.”

She looked him in those betraying eyes and just said, “It’s Daisy.”

He sagged. “For how long?”

“Until I get my people back.”

The world shimmered around her and she knew she had to hurry. Ward saw this as a natural disaster – something to be outrun – but she felt it in her bones. The end.

Mack was easy to find. He was in his house, broken, holding a blanket that had held his daughter until she vanished from his own arms. Skye cried with him.

Then she cold-cocked him. No one else was dying today.

She loaded him in the conveniently unlocked car outside, and started the engine with a little jolt from Quake.

They dropped him at the base, next to a door that Ward could not see.

“We down to bringing in unwilling volunteers?” a smiling voice asked. Daisy’s answering smile was immediate.

“Hey.”

Trip glanced between her and Ward, who shook his head. “You came back? Why?”

She nodded at Mack. “I have two more to extract. They didn’t make the first wave.”

He was in the Patriot armor and his eyes crinkled when he smiled. Ward said something about checking the chaos at Hydra and left. Neither one of them asked him to stay.

“Two more?” Trip was still smiling.

“Well, one. She came in for this one, so she should be easy to persuade.” She took a step closer. “And then…”

“Let’s find your girl, before we start with ‘and thens’,” he said. “I have an idea.”

His idea was a part of the prison they hadn’t seen last time, when they lost Mace. It gave her chills to be back here, especially having seen his lifeless body back in the ‘real world’. But Trip’s idea panned out. 

The Patriot armor plus some Quake waves got the doors open. Yoyo was strapped to the bed in her cell, unable to use her power and escape. Their hug was quick and hard, and then Yoyo was all business. 

“Mack?” 

“Devastated, but I brought him in. She’s already gone, his daughter. He lost her again.”

Yoyo had never met Trip. She didn’t flinch when she was introduced or really pay much attention at all. She got the directions from Daisy and with the nod, was off at superspeed to take Mack through that door before he woke up. 

That left them alone in this crumbling world. The car had already blinked out. 

“We have to hurry.” Daisy looked again at her phone, at the instructions Fitz had given her. 

“I’ll get you back in one piece, don’t you worry.” He smiled, but she shook her head. 

“Not to base - to Hydra.”

She explained on the way. How because they’d only just lost him, they could do it. How Fitz and Jemma had checked and double checked. How he was already willing to accept this as a simulation and that flexibility would save him. 

“Your guy Ward,” he said finally, after all of her arguments were made, “he exist back there?”

“Not anymore.” She said. “We killed him.”

He raised an eyebrow. 

“Long story.”

They were standing in front of the machine now. Daisy setting codes while outside trees, cars, whole buildings winked out of existence. 

He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “How will you get back? I’m not leaving you here.”

She covered his hand with her own. Of course he wasn’t. 

“We built two doors. Just in case everything worked.” She nodded at the off-color wooden one ten feet away. It looked like a broom closet. “I’ll be ok. Just have to walk through.” 

“You set me up,” his hand tightened on her shoulder until she looked up at those brown eyes, full of concern, “and hit your button and then you go right through that door. No waiting. This works or it doesn’t, but you go through.”

She bit her lip. “Trip - I-”

“You go through or I don’t.”

She punched in a few more of Fitz’s codes silently, trying to think of a way around this. 

“Fine. But don’t you make me lose you twice.”

“Girl, I will do my best. And you know that’s pretty good.” He winked and moved to the platform. 

The building shook. She punched in the final line of code. The button blinked red, red, yellow, and then green. 

“You ready?”

“To wake up in another world?” He smiled. “You gonna be there waiting?”

“You better believe it.”

“Hit the button already.”

So she did. The building shook again, as the scan started from his feet. Daisy hesitated. “If this doesn’t work - I-”

“Daisy, if it doesn’t work I disappear like the rest of this simulation and no one gets hurt.”

“I do,” she said, making sure to look him in the eye. Then she stepped through the door and woke up to Jemma’s worried face.


End file.
